Wilkie Collins reported that when he was a boy at boarding school, he was bullied by a fellow pupil who forced Collins to tell him a story every night before they went to bed. This Sultan-and-Scheherezade setup is like no other form of school bullying I’ve ever heard of (you mostly get beatings, vicious practical jokes, and ostracism, don’t you?) but even if it’s apocryphal, it’s the perfect origin for Collins’s writing. His novels, so often serialized, lead you on, night after night, keeping you on the edge of your scandalized seat, unwilling to let the novel fall until you’re sure what’s around the next bend — and that, with Collins, is impossible.

No Name is the second of the four novels Collins wrote in the 1860s, the ones that refined his craft and made his name. It’s also the last one of the four that I’ve read: the others are The Woman in White, Armadale, and The Moonstone. All four are innovative technical masterpieces, juggling narrative voice, technique (such as the documentary evidence and letters in The Moonstone, something that also pops up in No Name), and style. All four have hints of the occult — ghosts, twins, somnambulism, psychic phenomena — though none go so far as to leave the reader with strange explanations in the end. And all four are taut thrillers, combining humor and pathos with many (many!) surprises. I didn’t dare venture a guess about what would happen next, in case I missed what really did happen.

Caveat: I intend to go into a bit of detail in this review, so if you want to remain completely unspoiled about the book’s events, best quit reading now and go get the book. It’s highly recommended!

As the novel opens, the Vanstone family — father, mother, quiet daughter Norah, age 26, and irrepressible daughter Magdalen, age 18, are at home on the Combe-Raven estate. Their lives are happy; the worst that comes to trouble them is (as in Mansfield Park) the dreaded amateur theatricals, during which Magdalen comes to fall in love with the weak and petulant Frank Clare, much against her sister’s wishes. (These theatricals, by the way, are wonderfully portrayed, and Fanny could have done nothing but say “I told you so.”)

One day, Mr. Vanstone receives a letter from America. He and his wife, much troubled, promptly set off for London, without telling their daughters or the beloved governess, Miss Garth, the purpose of their trip. But a few months after their return, the bottom drops out of the Vanstones’ world. Mr. Vanstone is killed in a train accident, and Mrs. Vanstone (along with the nearly-full-term child she is carrying) dies of the shock. That same day, it is revealed that the purpose of the Vanstones’ trip to London was to be married, and so Norah and Magdalen were illegitimate — are Nobody’s Children — have No Name — and that Combe-Raven and all other property is to go to their uncle, Michael Vanstone, a vicious and vengeful man who has no intention of giving either girl any portion of the inheritance that should have been hers!

Norah, after her initial storm of grief, accepts her lot and decides to become a governess. But Magdalen is consumed with fury, and, swearing revenge on her uncle, leaves the protection of her sister and governess in order to enact her plans. She winds up with a distant relation of her mother’s, a certain Captain Wragge:

Taking his portrait, from top to toe, the picture of him began with a tall hat, broadly encircled by a mourning band of crumpled crape. Below the had was a lean, long, sallow face, deeply pitted with the small-pox, and characterized, very remarkably, by eyes of two different colors — one bilious green, one bilious brown, both sharply intelligent.

Wilkie Collins’s personal descriptions are some of the best things about this book. Look at that: the false mourning, meant to elicit sympathy when Wragge does his “moral agriculture” (scamming.) The small-pox: he’s a survivor. The eyes — you can’t trust him — but watch out; he’s no fool.

Here’s another portrait:

Seated not far from the front window, with his back to the light, she saw a frail, flaxen-haired, self-satisfied little man, clothed in a fair white dressing-gown many sizes too large for him, with a nosegay of violets drawn neatly through the button-hole over his breast. He looked from thirty to five-and-thirty years old. His complexion was as delicate as a young girl’s, his eyes were of the lightest blue, his upper lip was adorned by a weak little white mustache, waxed and twisted at either end into a thin spiral curl. When any object specially attracted his attention he half closed his eyelids to look at it. When he smiled, the skin at his temples crumpled itself up into a nest of wicked little wrinkles. He had a plate of strawberries on his lap, with a napkin under them to preserve the purity of his white dressing-gown.

That’s Mr. Noel Vanstone, son and heir of Michael Vanstone. Could there be a picture of more delicacy and weakness, like a debutante or a kitten — except for those wicked little wrinkles?

But Magdalen is not chiefly pitted against Noel Vanstone or Captain Wragge. Instead, her arch-enemy is an unimpeachably respectable housekeeper named Mrs. Lecount (an anglicized version of Leconte, and we all know we can’t trust the French.) Collins does an absolutely magnificent job of playing with our sympathies here (and how much more with Victorian sensibilities!) Magdalen is doing something genuinely wrong: seeking revenge, deceiving, hoping to hurt and defraud, and many other things that I won’t name. Mrs. Leconte has a few hidden motives — the mainspring of her action is to be right — but her goal is to protect her employer. Yet all the time, we want Magdalen to win. We want Mrs. Leconte out of the way, no matter what the cost. Here is part of a hair-raising description of the first encounter between the two, when Magdalen is waiting in Mrs. Lecount’s room:

On the table stood a glass tank filled with water, and ornamented in the middle by a miniature pyramid of rock-work interlaced with weeds. Snails clung to the sides of the tank; tadpoles and tiny fish swam swiftly in the green water, slippery efts and slimy frogs twined their noiseless way in and out of the weedy rock-work; and on top of the pyramid there sat solitary, cold as the stone, brown as the stone, motionless as the stone, a little bright-eyed toad. The art of keeping fish and reptiles as domestic pets had not at that time been popularized in England; and Magdalen, on entering the room, started back, in irrepressible astonishment and disgust, from the first specimen of an Aquarium that she had ever seen.

One of the themes of the book — so ably foreshadowed by the amateur theatricals — is how a person can maintain her integrity in the face of actions that betray her values. Magdalen is forced, or rather forces herself, into deeper and deeper degradations and falsehoods, but her tearing regret always reveals that her soul is still there. She encounters people along the way for whom we initially believe that not to be true — that they are so jaded by crime and fraud and deception that they no longer have true selves — but Collins peels away the layers: Magdalen herself is so blunt, so willing to name her agony and to say what her aims are, that the people around her inevitably respond in kind, and she finds help when she needs it most.

The book has many more twists and turns before the ending, and there is a great deal more to say about it: about intelligence (Mrs. Wragge, with her mental Buzzing, is a character right out of Dickens), and about voice — who is allowed to speak and who is not — and about whether Magdalen is actually reformed at the end (I think not — not any more than Captain Wragge.) But instead of discussing all this, I’ll let you read the book. It’s so well crafted, so well written, so well thought out, and also so purely exciting, that it has been one of my most satisfying reading experiences of the year so far.

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22 Responses to No Name

I didn’t read the whole post, I stopped before the detail. This is the only one of the four that I haven’t read. Is this one a must read for me since I enjoyed the other three? If so, I will have to procure a copy :-)

I second this question! I’m about to read my second Wilkie Collins (The Moonstone) for Halloween this year – I first read The Woman in White last year at this time and found him perfect for the season. I’d heard that his other books weren’t worth the time, but if they are, I’m eager to know (and reluctant to learn spoilers, since so much of his craft relies upon carefully-timed reveals).

Absolutely yes! I have read The Woman in White at least three times and The Moonstone twice, but Teresa and I read Armadale together and loved it, and No Name was just as brilliant. An absolute masterpiece of plotting, craft, and writing that is vivid, forceful, subtle and gripping. How could anyone not like Collins?

Yes, a must read. It is a stranger book than The Woman in White, more difficult in some ways, but it shares most of the earlier novel’s virtues.

The break Jenny notes is an example of the difficulties, as Collins suddenly destroys the amusing, trivial domestic novel with which he had been tricking me, replacing it with a melodrama. Further breaks and shatterings and rearrangements follow.

Jenny, you remind me how brilliantly the documentary interludes are used. One kind of story is told with the omniscient sections, then another kind with the documentary sections. Clever, and beyond clever.

I love that aquarium. There is a Victorian aquarium in Christopher Beha’s What Happened to Sophie Wilder. A coincidence? An allusion? I do not know.

Good question, since the different narrative voices and the evidence they bring are part of the entire point of Sophie Wilder.

No Name has so many of those breaks and rearrangements — I think the most shocking for me is that Magdalen actually goes through with her plans for revenge. I kept expecting her to be prevented at the eleventh hour.

Didn’t you find it too… preachy? It sounds like one of those books where there is a great risk that the moral message becomes more important than the writing, character development, etc.(yes, I’m looking at you, Hardy!)

Allow me to reassure you that it is not preachy at all. There is an obvious moral structure to the book (as there is in society) but the ordinary good-rewarded bad-punished-or-reformed trope simply does not apply. As I mention in my review, we are rooting for the evildoer the entire time, and we see the most outwardly respectable characters as wicked. It’s quite a subversive and ironic novel, as Tom says below.

We read this in one of my book groups this time last year and the memory of it is still strong with me. My real disappointment is always that apart from these four novels there is little of Collins’ writing that excites me. Still, I should be grateful that we have four, I suppose.

I have had this one on the TBR shelves (so I left your review for later reading). I recently came across Armadale and couldn’t resist adding it, but I also want to re-read The Woman in White, which apparently I have read but have no memory of (always disconcerting).

Oh, that’s happened to me before! Ever since I started blogging, I have a much better memory for books, but it’s still not perfect. (I’ll go back and read a review and go, “Oh, yeah, that’s what that was about!”) Armadale is probably last on my list of four wonderful novels, but really, you can’t go wrong.

I liked the other big three far more than this one. This one…. just did not do much for me in terms of love. I LIKED it, and I still LOVE Wilkie Collins, but I can’t place what did not work for me about this one.

I liked this one better than Armadale, for sure, though I really liked that one as well. This one I found so exciting and unpredictable. And the three main characters (Magdalen, Captain Wragge, and Mrs. Lecount) are such fabulous antiheroes, all three of them, such an unusual narrative trick! I adored it.